Beat Final Fantasy 1
I really liked this game. Most games are very difficult for me, I almost always play a modern game on story mode or ultra easy moron mode because I am terrible at manipulating a character in 3d space while shooting at someone else at the same time. That didn't stop me from loving Mass Effect lol.
But yeah, FFI is surprisingly easy to play...until the end. I was so glad that I didn't need to grind for hours outside any major dungeon or city before going in like in most other RPG's. I was able to follow along where I needed to go and fight the bosses without maxing out everything possible.
Until the end.
So apparently in the original NES version of the game some of the potions or items didn't work properly, making it difficult to finish the boss. In the Pixel Remaster that I played the devs decided to graciously fix those broken items but also massively buff the boss to compensate.
I don't mean gimmicky changes like giving him a TKO ability or anything. No, he has over 20k hp. The bosses prior to him have around 1k. The final boss is also immune to nearly everything so your physical attacks that were doing 900 damage now do 100 at best. Your spells now do 50 to 100 ish. The final fight took me two tries and over 20 minutes of straight fighting (per attempt!). My healer did her full team heal during every turn just to keep everyone above his damage output. I was lvl 52. The original game capped at lvl 50. Lol it was bonkers.
Yes, it's a final boss it should be crazy. But just prior I was getting bored 1 shotting everything in the end game dungeon on the way up to him. I assumed I had over leveled. Stuff was running away. It was fun tho to finally finish it.
After completing the main quest line I looked at the game achievements on Steam. I went back in the game and found the handful of chests I missed and then went to 100% the monster bestiary.
There was one small issue.
There is a rare mob that is required for it. He has a less than 4% drop rate and is as strong (attack wise) as the final boss. So I went to dungeon he was supposed to be in and farmed the area waiting for him to show up.
That was two days ago.
This afternoon I finally saw him. The little robot dude named Warmech. He did hit hard but had hardly any health so it only took like... 5 rounds to kill him. Not difficult at lvl 52. But it did take 2 days for him to spawn. I ran from so many black flans and medusas it was crazy.
The other pixel remastered Final Fantasy games are on sale on steam right now too. I might grab 2 and 3 to play later but I doubt they will be as simple and as fun to play as this one. Having a mostly linear game with a properly scaling level system is so refreshing.
If someone who had never played a classic RPG before asked me where to start I would tell them to give this a shot. Meanwhile my husband is over here playing a Dark Souls looking French game (I asked, it's Expedition 33) where you attempt to fight things and get killed over and over and over and over. He loves it. The mobs mumble in French and it reminds me of the monsters in the old Muzzy commercials for teaching kids other languages.